Profile: Russian agents' all-American lives

Russia Spy Row

Ten members of a Russian spy ring are being deported from the US after admitting they were foreign agents. An eleventh has fled.

Most of them appear to have led middle-class, all-American lives, pursuing businesses, setting up home in leafy suburbs, raising families.

Donald Heathfield (all names here are as given in the indictment) had convinced a business contact in the UK he was an "aggressive American entrepreneur".

Anna Chapman described herself in a YouTube video as a "start-up" specialist looking to connect young professionals in New York and Moscow, with a business pedigree acquired in the UK.

Moscow confirmed that at least some of the 11 were Russian citizens, but there were few immediate details from within Russia itself.

Here BBC News sketches in some of what is now known about the 11.

ANNA CHAPMAN

Anna Chapman posted images of herself on her Facebook page

Western newspapers pounced on images of this green-eyed, red-haired (as she appears in some pictures) woman on social networking sites. The "spy ring's femme fatale" and a "red-hot beauty" was how the New York Post described her.

According to media reports, she is 28 years old, born Anna Kushchenko, the daughter of a Russian diplomat, who received her higher education in Volgograd and Moscow.

She said she had lived for five years in the UK, working in the financial sector, and is reported to have been married for four years - between 2002 and 2006 - to Alex Chapman, whose name she has kept.

Mr Chapman, 30, now a trainee psychologist living in Bournemouth, told the Daily Telegraph he was not surprised when he learned of the allegations against his ex-wife.

He said she had changed dramatically during the marriage, and by the end was having "secretive" meetings with "Russian friends".

"It made sense because of all her erratic behaviour, all these high society people she was going on about," he is quoted as saying.

Mr Chapman also said she had confided to him that her father was a senior KGB agent, and he felt "she would do anything for her dad".

Ms Chapman did not seek to conceal her Russian identity when she arrived in New York from Moscow in February 2010, saying she wanted to build up a recruitment agency targeting young professionals in both cities.

Moving into an apartment within walking distance of Wall Street, Ms Chapman launched on social networks including LinkedIn and Facebook to develop business contacts and market her skills.

On her LinkedIn page, Ms Chapman is listed as the chief executive officer of PropertyFinder Ltd, which maintains a website featuring property listings in Moscow, Spain, Bulgaria and other countries.

An acquaintance in New York's property market, David Hartman, described her as "pleasant, very professional, friendly".

"There's nothing too crazy about her that I knew of," he added.

CHRISTOPHER METSOS

Christopher Metsos was staying at a hotel in Cyprus after being bailed

Aged 54 or 55 and a Canadian citizen, he was the only one to have been arrested outside the US, picked up in Cyprus by police on 29 June acting on an Interpol alert as he tried to board a flight to Budapest.

Released on 26,500 euros (£22,000; $33,500) bail a day later, he promptly disappeared and is now a fugitive.

Before his arrest, he had been staying alone at a hotel in Larnaca for nearly two weeks and was said by local media to be carrying a US passport.

He was depicted by US prosecutors as the spy ring's shadowy moneyman, visiting the US as early as 2004 to deliver bags of cash to its members.

Lenta.ru described him as "the most mysterious figure in the story".

RICHARD AND CYNTHIA MURPHY

Cynthia Murphy was a financial consultant in Manhattan

Arrested at their home in Montclair, New Jersey, he is said by US prosecutors to purport to be a US citizen born in Philadelphia and she, a US citizen from New York.

The husband is said to have lived in the US since the mid-1990s and settled in New Jersey.

Neighbours thought Cynthia was a financial consultant who commuted to Manhattan while Richard Murphy was a stay-at-home father, who "seemed kind of lazy".

They lived with their two primary school-age daughters in a two-storey house on a quiet tree-lined street.

A fresh copy of the Financial Times newspaper sat on the lawn and a green Honda Civic stood in the driveway, when ABC News visited the street after the couple's arrest.

She "didn't put a lot of time into her looks but she was sweet-looking, very pretty face with light make-up, maybe a little bit of lipstick, nothing profound", she added.

Another neighbour, Margo Sokolow, said the daughters had played with other children.

"They would ride their bikes, they had little pink bikes and they would ride around the neighbourhood."

DONALD HEATHFIELD AND TRACEY LEE ANN FOLEY

The couple's teenage sons were said to be well-behaved

Believed to both be in their 40s, they were living with their two teenage children in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home to Harvard and MIT.

They were both business partners in TechCast, a think tank that tries to predict the shape of tomorrow's technologies, and had also been members of a board at the Lifeboat Foundation, a non-profit organisation that encourages scientific advancements.

Rafael Ramirez, of the Oxford Futures Forum in the UK, has told the BBC he was in regular professional contact with Mr Heathfield over internet security and strategy programmes.

"He came across as an American entrepreneur, quite an aggressive American entrepreneur, trying to work internationally," Mr Ramirez said.

"I'm either very, very bad at second-guessing who is a Russian spy or he hid it very well."

David Bookbinder, who knew Mr Heathfield through work, said of the spying allegation: "At the time if someone would have said to me out of the blue 'You know, do you think he is this?', I would have said 'No'.

"Looking back at it now, it is a possibility. I think if I had to pick anybody out of the people I used to work with I would say it would be him because he was very closed off and kind of to himself."

US prosecutors said Mrs Foley, who purported to be Canadian, had travelled on a fake British passport, an allegation UK authorities were investigating.

VICKY PELAEZ AND JUAN LAZARO

Vicky Pelaez and Juan Lazaro are said to have been good neighbours

Born in Peru, Vicky Pelaez, 55, works as a journalist for El Diario La Prensa, a New York-based Spanish-language newspaper.

She is best known for her opinion columns, which often criticise the US government.

During the 1980s, she made a name for herself in Peru at the Frecuencia Latina TV channel where she was renowned for her controversial, aggressive style of reporting.

Waldo Mariscal, who is an adult son of Ms Pelaez, said his mother is innocent and dismissed the spy case as a "farce".

Mr Lazaro (age not given) is said to have purported to be a Peruvian citizen, born in Uruguay, although he was once overheard in his home saying in an unguarded moment: "We moved to Siberia... as soon as the war started."

Prosecutors have told a New York court that he has confessed to working for Russian intelligence. They say he has admitted that "Juan Lazaro" is not his real name, his home in Yonkers was paid for by Russian intelligence and that his wife passed letters to the "service" on his behalf.

He is also said to have told investigators that even though he loved his son, "he would not violate his loyalty to the 'service' even for his son", prosecutors wrote in a court document.

Jonathan Kroll, a man who knows them in Yonkers, New York, described the couple as "regular nice neighbours".

He said he had heard that Mr Lazaro told people he was a "professor of economics".

MICHAEL ZOTTOLI AND PATRICIA MILLS

Mr Zottoli and Ms Mills lived in a flat in Arlington

Michael Zottoli and Patricia Mills were arrested in Arlington, Virginia, where they were living with two young children.

They had moved there from Seattle after taking an advanced finance course at the University of Washington.

The two have admitted since they were arrested that they are Russian citizens and their real names are Mikhail Kutzik and Natalia Pereverzeva, prosecutors say.

Celest Allred, a neighbour on the ninth floor of the apartment block where they lived, said she had guessed "they were Russian because they had Russian accents".

The Seattle Times newspaper reports that the couple "did an Oscar-worthy job of maintaining their cover as a boring young Seattle couple slavishly devoted to their toddler son".

In his job at a telecom firm in Seattle, Mr Zottoli was "known as somewhat grumpy and distractible".

BBC links

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